What is our primary use case?
NICE CXone is used primarily for a customer-facing knowledge website. The customer-facing knowledge website is fully crowdsourced, so information is collected from customer-facing employees, use cases, tutorials, and best practices, which is then written up and published for customers to access for free with no login required.
Before choosing NICE CXone, other options were evaluated, including Salesforce, which was necessary because it was already in use by the company, and using it would have been free. However, it did not fit the needs for a variety of reasons, and there was another product in consideration, but I do not have any memory of what that was.
What is most valuable?
NICE CXone offers features that are easy to use, and I appreciate many features such as tagging and variables. The ease of use is really valuable since we are only two people without any technical support or resources to do development work for us, so we needed something that was super plug-and-play, and this fit the bill.
The tagging and variables specifically help with the workflow as they are designed to be used through custom classifications that allow us to create subpages, enabling us to further divide content into logical categories. For example, we might have a use case that has 50 articles in it, but we do not want to just list 50 article names on a page, which is not very usable. By using custom classifications to tag by product, add-on, contributor, or a variety of other factors, we can actually use the site's functionality to auto-sort articles into more concrete categories.
NICE CXone has positively impacted the organization as the website was built from scratch; I was hired to build this website six years ago, and it has grown phenomenally. It is integrated into all sorts of programs, different applications, and different campaigns, and I would not have been able to do that without a site that is very easy to use.
What needs improvement?
One inconvenience is that because we are crowdsourced, we have hundreds of contributors every year, with most people only submitting one article, maybe two, so it does not make sense to pay for licenses for all of those people. This leads to some intermediary manual copy-paste processes because we just cannot have everybody working in the system itself, making it a little bit problematic for maintaining a source of truth.
The main issues with NICE CXone are the lack of ability to integrate with some internal things that we want to do; it has to do with the way the system is designed, which is complex. We wanted to integrate with our internal system for instant translations, and we were not able to do that, along with a couple of other things that illustrate that it is kind of an isolated system to itself, making it pretty hard to tap into and grow even further.
There are a couple of little issues with reporting that have not been very good, but really, the system is very functional.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using NICE CXone for over five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
NICE CXone is stable, although the company seems to have a lot of outages; nevertheless, those generally do not last very long.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
NICE CXone's scalability is very good concerning the number of articles that could be hosted on the site. However, as far as the authoring experience goes, it is really bad, and it would be very cost-prohibitive to have the number of licenses needed to smooth out and make the authoring processes more efficient.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support for NICE CXone is good; it has always been good, except when they decided to change their model and get rid of their customer support representatives a year and a half ago. We now find ourselves in a random pool without a dedicated representative, which is really frustrating.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before using NICE CXone, Zendesk was used as the solution, but it was not what was wanted; it was just too basic and did not have the features needed.
How was the initial setup?
The experience with NICE CXone's pricing, setup cost, and licensing was fine when it was MindTouch before it was bought by the current company. However, the current contract is a little vague and confusing, and the instant translation pricing is absolutely horrible.
What was our ROI?
I have not seen a direct return on investment from NICE CXone; since our site does not require a login, we do not really have good metrics on specifically tracking whether a customer was going to churn. Our mission is adoption and renewals, which involves both customers accessing the site directly and customer success people using the site with their customers to prescribe tutorials and use cases, so the general growth serves as a sign of success.
What other advice do I have?
I do not have specific metrics in front of me that show the positive impact of NICE CXone, but we have grown page views and users phenomenally year on year. This fiscal year just ended in July, and we were probably up about 30% from last year, and it has been about the same every year—it just keeps growing and growing. Internally, success is judged by the number of different groups that integrate with us, so different groups come to us and say they want to use an API to pull content into their application, or they want to start using the site to publish all of their content for a specific industry or purpose because ours is the best place for it; there is no other logical place for it. The internal growth in usage and demand for content on our site truly reflects our success.
NICE CXone's AI capabilities regarding governance and security are not being used. NICE CXone's AI capabilities are not being used, so I cannot comment on the accuracy and reliability of output.
I do not have specific advice for others looking into using NICE CXone, but I suggest doing thorough due diligence, making a requirements matrix, and ensuring it fits their needs. I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10 overall.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.